Gambling is fun. Being able to pay for a perceived advantage is fun. Not everyone cares about total fairness in games and there is something inherently attractive about the chance to win something rare. These are just some of the facts of psychology. People are like this and if isn't the end of the world. Companies would be able to take advantage of this for profit if people didn't honestly enjoy this stuff on some level.

Which is why we don't regulate the sale of cocaine even a little bit. Because the way our minds work says cocaine is fun, and because companies should absolutely be able to exploit this weakness if they find it. It is their right to take advantage of this for profit.

Gambling is an addiction. It is harmful. It requires regulation, because people don't usually address their harmful addictions themselves. Their addictions harm themselves as well as other around them. Stop batting for companies by justifying their exploitation of people in this way.

Gambling is fun. Being able to pay for a perceived advantage is fun. Not everyone cares about total fairness in games and there is something inherently attractive about the chance to win something rare. These are just some of the facts of psychology. People are like this and if isn't the end of the world. Companies would be able to take advantage of this for profit if people didn't honestly enjoy this stuff on some level.

Theres alot of things people do that they dont enjoy. Gambling and drug abuse being at the top of the list.

1.) Ya'll gotta stop confusing devs with publishers.
2.) Game prices can go up when wages stop being flat/stagnant.
3.) Setting #2 aside to be realistic I guess, this reasoning of "Well they gotta do something to make money, you won't pay more for games" is foolish. Many of us WOULD pay $70+ if microtransactions died altogether, and maybe $80 if it came with quality DLC. But the genie don't go back in the bottle. They'd want that *and* DLC/MTX too.
4.) Only gamers could manage to become anti-consumer.

That was the argument that was said to me in response to the whole Shadow of War/NBA/Forza/Battlefront controversy with loot boxes. To cut a long, long argument short: I am against loot boxes in paid-for AAA games, and in fact the only one who was in the group conversation, and everyone else were okay with loot boxes. However, a collective agreement by them concluded that loot boxes are good and that they are fine with it because "life isn't fair" and that they PREFER people to buy P2W loot boxes for their advantage because "it's more satisfying to kill them knowing they have an advantage over me".

Am I out of touch here or is this it? Are [P2W] loot boxes in $60 AAA games here to stay now? When people are saying to me they LIKE loot boxes like this, and I bring up how they could have been free cheat codes or if tournaments and real life events like a football match introduced unfair elements, how that fairs against their argument, they call me out for being ridiculous. For instance, I said, if life isn't fair then would they be okay if goalkeepers paid referees to shorten their goal length as this is P2W and it would make them satisfied having scored a goal in a net that is shorter than their own one. I also said what if tournaments with cash prizes allowed its participants to buy loot boxes over other players for an instant advantage, and at that point, I was thrown with insults and being called ridiculous etc and some of them left.

Is this what the games industry is now? It seems like loot boxes are here for fucking good.

Fair enough, then tell them that "Games with lootboxes and microtransactions should then only be for people 21 and over! Also all other rules for gambling should apply for games with lootboxes and microtransactions, so no commercials on TV, only being sold at certain stores that have a license and no longer in toy stores.".

I'm getting rather sick and tired that I even have to shield off my paypal acount from my father, whom by accident bought a small lootbox in PEGGLE 2!!!!! A game I bloody paid for so he could play it on his old PC. I just had forgotten that my paypal account was still on his PC, and he doesn't take advantage of it. He just thought he had "won a new costume". The poor man now doesn't want to play the game anymore, as he's scared he'll buy more!

So yes, I'm very much against the practice and think if you have microtransactions? Your game can't be sold in toy stores anymore. If you also have lootboxes with said microtransactions, your game is a gambling game and should be treated as such

If these people in that group you talked about want to gamble? Fair enough. But do use the same rules for this as other gambling venues have to follow. If you want more income, make DLC and combine those DLC packs into an "expansion pack" later in the year for people to buy at stores or online. Expansion packs are the best way to fund new maps and garner more income. And before they defend themselves with "But then not everybody has the same maps in multiplayer", if the maps are good people will buy or will buy the "Gold, GOTY" edition. Most people I knew rebought Warcraft 3 rather than just the expansion pack when they could get an edition hat would install everything at the same time.

So make the maps good, and the sales will follow.

Originally Posted by Some Nobody

4.) Only gamers could manage to become anti-consumer.

Aaayuup, they and the tech enthusiasts are almost self hating at times. The "Then don't buy it." is at a level that smokers and car enthusiasts defend their addiction and "hobby". The industry takes huge advantage of this behavior.

Hey maybe if blizz actually let me just buy the skin i want directly instead of forcing me to open boxes at the end of events things would be less stressful.

I remember playing hours everyday during the 1st summer games event and it got to the point where i wasnt sleeping trying to get skins so i had to drop money. That was back when you couldnt even buy event skins with credits.

Here's my defense: This is better than the alternative, which is $80-$90 games or fewer games.

Okay, let's say this is actually true. That publishers are faced with a choice between using loot boxes and pricing their games at $80.

I'd much, much, much rather take the latter. An $80 game will drop in price (and will do so relatively soon). Or I can buy it second hand at a cheaper price.

A game infested with loot boxes and grind infested progression systems will always have those things. The game design will always suffer.

That brings up an aspect of this trend people don't really discuss much. Coming back and playing these games in 20 years when it won't even be possible to buy the items you need to skip the horrible grind the developers put in to sell items because the digital store is no longer supported, or the publisher lost the licence (a real possibility with this game in particular) or simply doesn't exist any more.

This rush to GAAS and loot boxes/paid progression systems is going to be horrible for the longevity of these games.

Which is why we don't regulate the sale of cocaine even a little bit. Because the way our minds work says cocaine is fun, and because companies should absolutely be able to exploit this weakness if they find it. It is their right to take advantage of this for profit.

Originally Posted by ArkhamFantasy

Theres alot of things people do that they dont enjoy. Gambling and drug abuse being at the top of the list.

Are you actually equating playing videogames for fun to chemical dependency now?

Are you actually equating playing videogames for fun to chemical dependency now?

Gambling is a form of illness for many, just like drug abuse. Chemical dependency and gambling are pretty linked in the brain in some ways.

Why do loot boxes provide such a dark compulsion? Psychologists call the principle by which they work on the human mind 'variable rate reinforcement.' "The player is basically working for reward by making a series of responses, but the rewards are delivered unpredictably," says Dr Luke Clark, director at the Center for Gambling Research at the University of British Columbia. "We know that the dopamine system, which is targeted by drugs of abuse, is also very interested in unpredictable rewards. Dopamine cells are most active when there is maximum uncertainty, and the dopamine system responds more to an uncertain reward than the same reward delivered on a predictable basis."

What's more, the effect of variable rate reinforcement is very persistent. Psychologist B.F. Skinner conducted trials during the early 1930s in which he conditioned animals to respond to certain stimuli in closed chambers that became known as Skinner Boxes, and showed that even when the rewards were removed, the subject would continue responding for sometimes hundreds of trials, trying to recreate the circumstances in which it got its reward before.

"Modern video games then amplify this idea by having many overlapping variable ratio schedules," says Clark. "You're trying to level up, advance your avatar, get rare add-ons, build up game currency, all at the same time. What this means is that there is a regular trickle of some kind of reinforcement." Whether you're watching your XP climb up to the next level in Overwatch, or you're collecting scraps in Battlefield 1 by breaking down skins, there's a constant sense of reward leading to reward.

The clever—or insidious—bit is how a loot box is wired into a game, and how it doles out its baubles, keeping a player on the knife-edge between feeling hungry and feeling rewarded. One such system is Battlefield 1’s Battlepacks. Standard Battlepacks are earned by playing multiplayer matches. They used to be randomly awarded, but they recently switched to an Overwatch-like progression bar system for more regular drops. Each one is a guaranteed weapon skin or one of a number of pieces of a unique weapon. So that would seem satisfying, if it wasn’t for the scrap system.

You can't vote with your wallet, unless you're voting *for* the practise. It's like spam, you can not respond to it, but as long as one person is suckered in then it justifies it to the perpetrators and it continues.

Shockingly your overwatch lootcrate bought you items for use in Overwatch....?

You can stop acting stupid. Unless it's not an act. But regardless, you have no way of knowing what the loot boxes will give you. Pretty simple concept, but I can understand if that's too difficult for you to grasp.

Gambling is a form of illness for many, just like drug abuse. Chemical dependency and gambling are pretty linked in the brain in some ways.

Yes, dopamine is your brain telling you it is enjoying what you're doing.
It is manipulated by sinister forces that you have no personal control over by things like "Game Design" to trick poor vulnerable videogamers into having fun and eliciting a conditioned response.

I'd say more than anything the latest trends and moves are more about risk management for the companies. I also don't really mind loot boxes that much, I usually play plenty if its a game I'm invested in and unless it's an egregious offender, I never even feel inclined to buy a loot box. That being said it's allowed a lot of companies to effectively change their content releases to focus primarily on loot boxes and the cosmetic or otherwise items within them.

Destiny, Overwatch etc. Are more focused on creating content to go into their loot packs, than actual content to play. When it's brought up, people defend it by saying "Well the content is free so". No, it's really not, it's just been subsidized in a more profitable way. It also works out that many consumers prefer it, so that's good. But it doesn't give them an excuse to basically not care about putting out real content, especially when they keep stretching out games/milking them for longer and longer.

From a thread I created a while back, feel like it's pertinent here.

Now it's just changed to the same thing, supplemented by loot crates. But has gotten worse when it comes to actually having to provide real content, because their income as time progresses is tied not as much to additional game sales, but to microtransactions. So selling premium or newer content isn't really the incentive anymore, well it is, but just enough to keep people coming back so they pay out of the newest set of loot crate stuff.

Yup. Once you've established an rng scheme for content delivery you don't have to pitch actual products anymore, nor are you limited to one sale per customer/piece of content. Taking a peek at gaming in 2017 makes CEOs across the entertainment industry rather wet I'm sure

Cosmetic loot boxes in multiplayer only games are A-OK with me. I might actually enjoy them a bit.

Non-cosmetic or loot boxes in single-player games drive me up the wall. They either add nothing of value at all besides a way to rip off money from the lowest common denominator or they ruin the balance of the game itself.

- I want the Witch Mercy skin, in order to do so I need to keep grinding so I can get lootboxes, which does not actually guarantee me the skin I want. I can buy more lootboxes with real cash, but once again this does not actually guarantee me the Witch Mercy skin, only the chance of getting it.

vs.

- I like someone's podcast/writing/YouTube videos, so I contribute a few dollars a month to support them.

How is this comparable? Yes, in both cases it's a small group subsidizing content for a greater audience, but there's a huge difference in how lootboxes are implemented (randomized content designed to take as much money from players as possible) vs. Patreon, which is essentially just a donation service.

In Overwatch you can bypass the loot boxes and just buy skins outright.

I think they're fine as is, It's like purchasing a pack of baseball cards. Random has been around in games for a long time (I remember playing a PC game called 10six way back in 1999 that had the way you earn things be random) and it adds an element of excitement to the games. The expectation that you should be able to easily 'earn' everything the game is flawed. As long as it's random for everyone it's fair.

The biggest problem in my mind is them being purchasable with real money - as well as anything else in the game. I liked the days when you bought a game - you got the full thing, so did everyone else. This is the bad influence that's seeping into games. You can't really blame them though with income inequality growing, they have to milk those who have the money.

Are you actually equating playing videogames for fun to chemical dependency now?

I'm not equating playing videogames to chemical dependency. I'm drawing a comparison between regulation towards one potentially life-destroying addiction and another potentially life-destroying addiction.

Originally Posted by ArjanN

Nah.

If all the DLC/Season pass/ loot box stuff didn't exist games would most likely be $10-20 bucks more expensive again.

Then don't buy the game on release? At least the integrity of the game itself isn't hurt then by the time you do get around to playing it.

Loot boxes are the worst, hopefully all the news around them has one developer emphatically cut them out of a game, go onto massive success, and every publisher just assumes the news that the game doesn't have loot boxes caused the massive success (not... you know... being a good game) and requires all its future games not to have loot boxes, and they sell more copies and every publisher copies them.

yeah I know it won't happen, in fact probably just the opposite after Destiny 2 and Mordor 2 both announce they made a bajillion dollars from loot boxes :(

I'm not equating playing videogames to chemical dependency. I'm drawing a comparison between regulation towards one potentially life-destroying addiction and another potentially life-destroying addiction.

Right, except - you're not.
There has never been a case where someone is in a financial black hole, but buy that one more loot crate, because that one more loot crate might be the big payout that gets them out of it - which is where actual gambling causes problems, and it is fucking infuriating to see people trivialising real world problems with false equivalency to "thing I don't like" because due to idiomatic usage "gambling" can mean actual gambling, as well as just "any activity with a degree of risk".

Because risk vs reward is a basic tenet of game design in general, and games being "addictive" (in the figurative sense) is a side effect of a game being good fun that you want to continue playing.

Loot boxes are bad, but I do think we as the anti loot box crowd are a vocal minority. The average person who plays games just accepts it as normal and gladly buys virtual currency. My barber who regularly plays NBA 2K says he was glad for the option to level up his player faster in My Career because he didn’t have the time to level up by simply playing the game. When I explained to him that the developers purposely made the grind monotonous to get him to pay for VC he didn’t seem to care. He felt like $20 wasn’t a lot to spend to level up his player more quickly. All I have to do is give 1 haircut to make that money back he said. Sadly, I think loot boxes are here to stay.

With each passing year I become more and more convinced loot boxes, gacha, micro-transactions etc. need to be highly regulated, because the game industry will never reel itself in. There's too much skinner box bullshit that doesn't make games more fun or interesting, but sure does fatten the bank accounts of big publishers.

Right, except - you're not.
There has never been a case where someone is in a financial black hole, but buy that one more loot crate, because that one more loot crate might be the big payout that gets them out of it - which is where actual gambling causes problems

Just to check, you're aware that you don't need to literally lose your last shirt button for your gambling (paying real money for an unknown 'reward') to be categorised as problematic, or even an addiction?

Just to check, you're aware that you don't need to literally lose your last shirt button for your gambling (paying real money for an unknown 'reward') to be categorised as problematic, or even an addiction?

Compulsive behaviours are compulsive behaviours, and occur in literally every hobby.
Are there wide swathes of people no longer able to play any videogames without a lootbox component being present?
You aren't speaking about specific cases of "problematic" behaviour - you are saying all lootboxes are inherently problematic, and further comparing that - entirely frivolously - to chemical dependencies which are not psychological in nature.

e:
And this "People spend a lot of money on a thing they enjoy! Thats terrible! Wont someone think of the children!" attitude to prop up the "I don't like thing others do" argument actually being made has plagued videogames since before they were videogames, with the ruination of youths and the evil spectre of pinball

Ill buy your competitorsgames that don’t do loot boxes because life isn’t fair is a two way street. That and knowingly taking advantage of addictive personality “whales” is gross IMHO. There has to be a way we can keep big games profitable and make the world at least as well off if not better. For instance, I put Humble Bundle in the better category.

Loot box are like Stockholm syndrome, we are hostages to the companies that enforce this kind of practice, but the more we use, the more we feel that they are alright and that there is no problem at all.

Companies aren't going to get rid of lootboxes unless a law is passed banning them. Gamers want the following:

1. Games that look better than the previous year's games, both in visual fidelity and scope.
2. $60 games

Sure, a company could announce Huge Franchise X's next title will have no lootboxes but come as the huge, "complete" package people expect but it's retail price is $80. But now their competitors can counter that by continuing to offer $60 games of the same quality (I know this is extremely subjective but roll with it for the purpose of my argument) but they'll include optional lootboxes you, the consumer, never have to pay for.

So you might pick the $80 game because you really hate lootboxes but most people don't care and they'd rather get the cheaper game.

Consumers care more about price and game quality. And when I say game quality I'm not talking about whether the game is actually good or not. The "quality" they want is if the game looks like it took a lot of money to make. Great graphics, huge checklist of features, full voice acting, etc. They want as much as the latter ("quality") while paying as little as possible.

Plus, there's bad implementations of lootboxes/DLC/etc. along with good implementations. I think it's hasty to throw the baby out with the bathwater and write off entire business models because some implement them poorly.

I'm actually surprised no AAA game has gone the Google route and added advertisements before every multiplayer match or during loading screens. I mean Google seems to do pretty well with that model. You could then even sell an "Adblock" as a microtransaction: Don't want to watch ads? Give us 10$ and the next ten matches won't have ads!

I'm actually surprised no AAA game has gone the Google route and added advertisements before every multiplayer match or during loading screens. I mean Google seems to do pretty well with that model. You could then even sell an "Adblock" as a microtransaction: Don't want to watch ads? Give us 10$ and the next ten matches won't have ads!

Wipeout HD did this for a time, people didn't like it. The free downloadable version of Psi-Ops did something like that as well.

Besides, way things are going companies figured out that the best way to make more money is by hiding some items behind lootboxes, or simply allowing players to buy an item that would otherwise require completing an intentionally egregious task.

My personal stance is that as long as these p2w items don't put me at a disadvantage against other players I don't really care. If it does I'm out. Simple as that.

Compulsive behaviours are compulsive behaviours, and occur in literally every hobby.
Are there wide swathes of people no longer able to play any videogames without a lootbox component being present?
You aren't speaking about specific cases of "problematic" behaviour - you are saying all lootboxes are inherently problematic, and further comparing that - entirely frivolously - to chemical dependencies which are not psychological in nature.

e:
And this "People spend a lot of money on a thing they enjoy! Thats terrible! Wont someone think of the children!" attitude to prop up the "I don't like thing others do" argument actually being made has plagued videogames since before they were videogames, with the ruination of youths and the evil spectre of pinball

It is almost as if dopamine was a chemical being tweaked (yes pun) by psychologists turned statisticians manipulating its levels for maximum
corporate exploitation.

Clearly the fact that it is manufactored naturally within the human body gives corporate pushers carte blanche to manipulate its production in the most exploitative, harmful, money-centric ways possible.

Getting items that ome neither need nor wants, that offer zero utility even within the virual space of the game the loot boxes have been crammed into, IS NOT "STILL WINNING ""SOMETHING"". It is losing. Period. Full stop. Calling it anything else is to be the worst sort of liar.

They exploit fundamental weaknesses within the very physio-mental structure and function of the human condition. They are not merely problematic, they are villainy.

Using basic psychology to make a product appealing is a fundamental part of a vast swathe of jobs.
It seems a bit rich to single out lootboxes as any more egregious than marketing in general, or even game design in general.

Using basic psychology to make a product appealing is a fundamental part of a vast swathe of jobs.
It seems a bit rich to single out lootboxes as any more egregious than marketing in general, or even game design in general.

Its ludicrous to suggest its villainy.

You argue from a postion of acute sociopathy.

There is no discourse to be had with such as you.

For anyone else interested in the subject, I would suggest doing some research, if you have not already done so.

The TLDR is that *gasp* YES, marketing, as it exists today, is exploitative, anti-consumer, and anti-human, in general. But fuck humanity, right? Corporations are people too.